Payward, Kraken’s parent company, will connect Franklin Templeton’s BENJI token money market fund to its platform as collateral and cash management, allowing clients to earn a return on dollars dormant on-chain.
summary
- Kraken Payward’s parent company has entered into a strategic partnership with Franklin Templeton to bring tokenized shares, yield products and BENJI Money Market Fund to blockchain bars for institutional and select retail clients.
- Franklin Templeton’s tokenized money market fund BENJI will be integrated into the Kraken platform as collateral and cash management infrastructure, while the Payward xStocks framework — which has processed more than $30 billion in transaction volume since its launch — will co-develop new actively managed on-chain products.
- The deal comes to a close as Franklin Templeton deepens its crypto footprint with the acquisition of cryptocurrency investment firm 250 Digital and the expansion of its Franklin Crypto division, signaling that one of the world’s largest asset managers is approaching blockchain distribution as a core line of business rather than a side project.
Kraken’s parent company Payward and Franklin Templeton have announced a strategic partnership to tokenize and distribute traditional financial products through Kraken’s exchange infrastructure, according to a report by Kraken. Decryption.
BENJI teams up with xStocks in $30 billion tokenization partnership
The immediate delivery is the integration of Franklin Templeton’s BENJI tokenized money market fund into the Kraken platform, where it will serve as collateral and a cash management tool for institutional clients – effectively allowing professional traders to park idle capital in an on-chain yielding dollar instrument without leaving the Kraken ecosystem.
BENJI, which Franklin Templeton launched in 2021 on the Stellar blockchain before expanding to Polygon, Arbitrum and other networks, is one of the longest-running tokenized money market funds in the industry and a direct competitor to BlackRock’s BUIDL, which recently surpassed $2.3 billion in assets under management. By integrating BENJI into Kraken’s collateral framework, Franklin Templeton gains a distribution channel that reaches both institutional offices and the exchange’s large retail base in jurisdictions where the product is available, while Kraken gains a regulated, yield-generating dollar instrument that it can offer as an alternative to dormant USDT or USDC balances held in trading accounts.
In addition to BENJI, the two companies plan to use Payward’s xStocks framework as the basis for new on-chain actively managed products, making Franklin Templeton’s investment strategies available to institutions and individual investors in select jurisdictions. xStokes, precedent crypto.news As the story noted, it has processed over $30 billion in transaction volume since its launch last year, building a tokenized equity infrastructure that now covers more than 50 US stocks and ETFs and positioning Kraken as one of the leading venues for on-chain exposure to traditional assets outside of dedicated RWA platforms like Ondo Finance.
Franklin Crypto, 250 Digital and the race to own on-chain distribution
The Payward partnership is part of a broader push by Franklin Templeton to build a vertically integrated crypto and tokenization business. The company has grown its dedicated cryptocurrency division, Franklin Crypto, through the acquisition of cryptocurrency investment firm 250 Digital, adding research, portfolio management and distribution capabilities that complement its existing token fund products. The Franklin Templeton XRPZ ETF also led Monday’s XRP ETF inflow data with $13.6 million in a single day, making it the first product in a group of five funds that collectively raised $25.8 million — the largest daily inflow for an XRP ETF since January 5, 2026 — as noted in a recent report. crypto.news story.
Combined, Franklin Templeton now has the XRP Spot ETF, a cross-chain tokenized money market fund, a cryptocurrency investment arm via 250 Digital, and a distribution partnership with one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges. This stack puts it in a structurally different position than most traditional asset managers, who are still debating whether to offer a single distinct product rather than building an end-to-end on-chain distribution network. your crypto.news The story of BlackRock’s tokenized fund’s second filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission at Securitize showed that the race among the largest traditional asset managers to own on-chain distribution is now openly competitive, with BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and Fidelity simultaneously moving on tokenized product lines that would have been considered experimental until 2023. For Kraken, the appointment of Franklin Templeton as a product partner rather than just a custodial client is the clearest sign yet that xStocks is evolving from Just place Ramsey shares into a full institutional financial products platform with Wall Street names behind them.
